On September 3rd, 2024, Selena Zhang became Atkinson’s new Executive Officer, Advocacy and Engagement. Selena can be reached at szhang@atkinsonfoundation.ca

Arrivals can be awkward. A polite handshake. Casual commentary about the weather. A reciting of one’s resume. There are few shortcuts to time spent together in the process of building trust and learning to collaborate. As I was thinking about how to introduce myself to the Atkinson community, it occurred to me that there are better ways to do so than by rhyming off the places I’ve worked. This narrow view of our lives looks tidy in retrospect, but it misses the messiness in the middle, the humanness of it all, and some of the more important things that actually help us to understand and relate to each other. 

So in lieu of that traditional virtual handshake, allow me instead to invite you to glimpse some of the moments and people from my life who have shaped the person I am today. 

Of all the places I’ve worked, what remains the most formative is also the least similar to where I have spent the rest of my career. It is a workplace I have been thinking about a lot lately, since the release of UN Special Rapporteur Tomoya Obokata’s report on migrant workers following his recent visit to Canada.

In the marginal years of my adulthood, I got a job on an asparagus farm near London, Ontario, living and working with thirty-five seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico. My coworkers took me under their wing — during the day, teaching me the ropes and helping me catch up in the fields and on the assembly line, and in the evenings, sharing their music, telenovellas, and stories of where they came from. People like my friend Jose, the eldest in a family of six, who left school at fourteen when his father died. At forty, he told me he didn’t want his children to grow up without a dad like he had, but the choice between leaving them for eight months of every year and letting them go hungry was no choice at all. 

The permanent temporariness of their bodies and status in Canada was unlike anything I’d ever seen — yet parts of our daily life together also felt familiar to my own story of arrival. I moved to Canada with my parents in the 1990s, when I was eight. Ours is a typical immigrant story — the first generation tiptoeing in our new home. The experience of being new is effortful and confusing. It is lonely. When you don’t know what the rules are, you’re always worried that you’re breaking them. My parents made a living in laundromats, restaurants, factories and warehouses, and the textile industry. They were met with and created community around them. They were met with and faced adversities along the way. 

Like my parents when they first arrived, the experience of my compañeros was one of tiptoeing. But unlike my parents, the nature of my colleagues’ employment contracts tied their status in Canada to our employer, which meant that being fired also meant being deported from the country. Unlike my family, none of my colleagues had a pathway to citizenship, even though most of them had been coming to Canada for eight months of every year through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program — sometimes ten or twenty years. 

In my subsequent time working on farms across southern Ontario and in Leamington, which has the highest concentration of migrant workers across the country, there are too many moments and experiences l heard about or saw first-hand that reflect what Obokata pointed to when he called aspects of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” People not receiving adequate breaks, working in greenhouses so hot that buckets of sweat would pool up in their boots, and they had to rush to finish their rows so that they could run out to throw up and then run back in to keep working. Workers asked to spray pesticides without proper training or protective equipment. My friend Miguel, accused of lying that the pesticides were making him sick, sent home halfway through the season for being “too slow.” Workers deported for talking to a labour union, or complaining about working conditions. Daily acts of discrimination.

I have met many decent farmers, who have good relationships with their workers and treat them well. It is important to acknowledge the decency of individuals. And, it is important to point to systems that allow for indecency to thrive in private; that continue to make decency an individual choice rather than a given, a protected right.

As I’ve made my way through my career, and as I watch the tireless work of so many organizations and organizers fighting for that decency —many of whom longstanding partners of the Atkinson Foundation, like the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change and Workers Action Centre — I find myself returning to the same questions: What does it take to turn those indignities so often experienced in private into a shared and public conversation? What does the choreography of change look like? How do we each lend our hands and voices from where we sit to bring forth lived differences for workers, in the policy windows that emerge from those moments when the winds of public attention shift momentarily in their direction? 

Movements are mythic in retrospect, and messy in the middle. Sociologist Kenneth T. Andrews writes that the successful ones amass three kinds of power over time: cultural power, or the work of changing narratives even among those not engaged with the issue; disruptive power, or the work of making it more costly or difficult to participate in the current way of doing things; and organizational power, or funding and other forms of backbone support to ensure people and activities bringing attention to the issues are sustained over time. In this choreography of change, each of us has a role to play in amassing movement power: conscientious community members, advocates and activists, unions, business leaders, policy innovators, funders and philanthropists, researchers and journalists, artists and storytellers. 

One of my favourite works of art is Taryn Simon’s photographs of impossible bouquets, a concept borrowed from the tradition of Dutch paintings which in the seventeenth century depicted fantasies of flowers that could never bloom naturally in the same season and place. Each of the bouquets in Simon’s photographs recreates a floral centerpiece from the signing of an international treaty — a commentary on how policy, and political, and economic power is created, performed, and maintained.

It feels natural that today, flowers, fruits and vegetables that would never have been grown together are in the same greenhouses and fields, just as our communities reflect the same kind of co-mingling and co-existence of people and families, and stories of arrival. The photographs remind me that what once felt impossible can be designed and brought to life, and then shared with others. 

Throughout my career so far, I have been lucky to work in service and support of changemakers who have taught me that impossible bouquets can be wrought, sometimes all at once but most often incrementally, as messy and imperfect as they may be in every iteration. Communities coming together on their main streets and in public spaces to protest, celebrate, mourn, demand a different future. Business and cross-sector leaders sitting down together talk about their shared responsibilities in interrupting cycles of gentrification and displacement. Indigenous leaders reimagining and building systems for education and skills development aligning with their own worldviews, values, and ways of life. Policymakers and elected officials coming together to learn about and engage with their responsibilities on the right to home. Self-organizing systems of community resilience during COVID. Caremongering data nerds. Communities of practice, action, and change. 

American activist Miriame Kaba talks about the strategic imperative of centering active hope in this work. “We do not need to believe that everything will work out in the end. We need only decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to the outcome we desire, and abide by what those decisions demand of us.” 

 While I do not yet see perfectly the shape of our work together and what lies ahead in this new role, I feel purposeful in this arrival, to an organization the mantle of which is to explicitly contribute to economic and social justice, and to strengthen movements for decent work and a fair economy. As I enter the threshold of this new home, take off my shoes and wash my hands, I look forward to meeting you. To listening. To sharing. To shedding. To changing. To sitting with you as we work together, hope together, in service of these and other impossible bouquets.